Gov’t Mule covering Ray Charles — I Believe To My Soul, at Rockpalast, 2007.

There are dark days ahead for Florida under the rule of Governor Scottdemort.

Barack Obama is in Korea lecturing Americans to suck it up and embrace the catfood at the same time Biden was left to represent the WH at the Arlington National Cemetery ceremony to honor America’s Veterans; all so Obama could sell out American labor via a Korean free trade agreement. Dumbest politics ever.

On the tenth Veterans Day of the Afghanistan War, it’s time to do more for our troops and veterans than put a sticker on a car or a magnet on the fridge. Let’s get moving.

I wanted to highlight something about the Cat Food Commission to permanently shrink government, something we’ve all known about, but which hasn’t been laid out in specific detail in a while. This Presidential commission has been borrowing paid staffers from groups that are ideologically committed to destroying the social safety net in America. This hasn’t been well-reported in the traditional media until today.

We all know how 11 dimensional chess works: President Obama claims he supports something easily acceptable and mainstream, like removing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or closing the illegal prison at Guantanamo Bay. His plan for doing so however, involves an ethereal, un-named bill making its way through both the House and Senate, which have almost [...]

I don’t feel like going point by point through the recommendations put forward by President Obama’s deficit commission appointees Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, mainly because their real goal is to advance conservative ideology; they are a wish-list of horrific, anti-middle class proposals supported by only two men with no real political power. But I do want to highlight their treatment of a robust public health insurance option, a very popular progressive idea that would also have the added benefit of cutting the deficit. It perfectly encapsulates the anti-progressive, anti-middle class, pro-corporatist ideology the “serious” people try to advance using their deficit hysteria.

Allen West may be the nuttiest of the nutjob Republicans elected last week, and it took him negative-55 days in office to register his first controversy. West signaled his intention to hire a Florida conservative talk-show host as his chief of staff. After criticism of her and some of her comments (calling Nancy Pelosi “garbage,” basically calling for armed insurrection to take back the government), West dropped her, with the talk-show host, Joyce Kaufman, saying she would not be used in an “electronic lynching” by liberals. (West is black, by the way.)

But the case doesn’t appear to be that cut and dried. Kaufman may have incited a threat against Broward County schools, which is probably more the reason she won’t be running a Congressional office in Washington.

The National Journal reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee will move the nomination on Michelle Leonhart for DEA administrator next week after a seven-month delay. Leonhart, a drug warrior to the core, has served as the temporary head of DEA since she was promoted to that position by George W. Bush in 2007.

In her time at the DEA, Leonhart has organized the campaign against medical marijuana, and ignored the clear directive from Attorney General Eric Holder to stop raiding dispensaries. Despite this flagrant insubordination, President Obama saw fit to nominate Leonhart to serve as the official DEA head earlier this year. And now, it looks like Leonhart will move through the Senate, with few signs that anyone in the Senate will actually fight her nomination, let alone stop it.

To understand how ridiculous the “serious” people are in Washington, and how broken our political debate is, let me draw your attention to the three biggest political stories of the day. Together, they make the clear case that all this so-called concern about the “deficit” is simply a justification the powerful use to attack the middle class.